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The Work of a College 
during the War 

Address at the opening of the 118th 

year of Middlebury College, 

September 20, 1917 



By President John M. Thomas 



MIDDLEBURY, VERMONT 

19 17 



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THE WORK OF A COLLEGE DURING 
THE WAR. 

In opening this 118th year of Middlebury College 
we might ignore the situation of our country, hurrying 
its energies into the great war, and counsel how we 
might shut out from our minds during the coming 
months the distractions of pubHc events and concen- 
trate our attention on academic pursuits. I might 
urge you to forget as far as possible submarines and 
aeroplanes, and trenches and dugouts, and advise that 
since you are now in college, enlisted for study, you 
drop all thought of any personal relation to the great 
conflict or of any other topic connected with war. 

But even if it were possible to divorce our thought 
from the stupendous events now occurring, and from 
the awakened passion of our nation to bear its part in 
the renovation of the world, it would not be patriotic 
for us to do so. As teachers and students we are still 
citizens, and even at the cost of considerable diversion 
from the educational endeavors which are our primary 
purpose, we must follow the course of the struggle, 
informing ourselves as best we may of the deeds of 
the armies and the fleets, and still more carefully seek- 
ing to work our way through to the real issues of the 
conflict and the principles which are being fought out 
for the world to live by after the great horror has 
passed. College men and women should allow none 
to excel them in patriotism, nor in patriotic interest 
in the problems and endeavors of their country. 



But it would not be in the interest even of your 
education to attempt to forbid you all thought of the 
war and its issues while pursuing your studies. To 
ask you to forget the war would not be sound educa- 
tional method. Education has for its object to make 
one at home in the world, to enable one to take his 
place as a man in the world of men. This war is 
changing the whole face of things; the life of man is 
going to be different in a thousand ways after it is 
over. An education, therefore, which is sound and 
practical, must fit one for life in the renovated world, 
and that means that the process by which it is becom- 
ing new, the principles and ideals which are being 
thrown into the discard and the new ones which are 
taking their places, must be taken into thoughtful 
consideration. You are expected in about twenty 
years to catch up with a very old world, and a 
world which has been moving the last three years 
at a pace never before maintained. To ask you 
to remain indifferent to what is now occurring would 
be to propose to leave you a whole era behind the 
world in which you must live. Let us not try to for- 
get the war, but rather let us inquire what the work 
of a college should be during the war. I propose 
that as my subject — the work of a liberal college dur- 
ing the present conflict of the nations. 

Part of that work is direct, — service under the col- 
ors in army and navy. We are already represented 
by over one hundred alumni and former students and 
the list is growing daily. Middlebury is bearing her 
full part of the great sacrifice which the American col- 



leges are making. When the statistics of the war are 
compiled, it will be found that a larger proportion of 
college men entered the service than of any other 
class. They are subject to the same draft and they 
were first to be called upon for the officers' training 
camps. Their eager and noble response has been an 
inspiration to the entire country, and their part in 
the conflict will be a witness for years hence to the 
sound and thorough patriotism of the American col- 
leges and their great value and importance in the life 
of our nation. 

It may be that we are by no means through with 
the sacrifice we must make. We have learned by this 
time to be deliberate, to wait until we learn where our 
service will count for most; but we stand ready, I 
trust, to the last man to place ourselves under the flag 
when the path of duty is clear. We are in the war to 
win. A part of our heritage in our mother tongue is 
the counsel of Tom Brown at Rugby, — **Boys, don't 
fight, but if you do fight, don't give up while you can 
stand or see." We tried to obey the first part of that 
motto, and we will not be found disobedient to the 
other part if it takes the last man who can pass the 
surgeons. 

But at present the nation has chosen whom she de- 
sired and through high officers of army and navy, 
through the national Commissioner of Education, 
and even by the voice of President Wilson, has bid- 
den the rest of us maintain our college at the highest 
possible standard, both in attendance and in quality of 
work. There can be no question of the wisdom or 



the patriotism of that advice. It has been suggested 
that colleges and universities turn their laboratories 
during the war into experiment stations for war indus- 
tries and occupations. They were not built for that 
purpose, and for the most part such work can be done 
better elsewhere. A recent writer in The Nation has 
proposed that college faculties, freed from pressure in 
the care of students, become University Extension 
lecturers and engage in a campaign to instruct the 
public in the meaning of democracy. There are prac- 
tical difficulties in the way of carrying out this sugges- 
tion which perhaps I need not take the time to 
mention. 

I believe that a college can do its best work during 
the war by being a college and doing the normal work 
of a college under the stimulus of the great endeavor 
of the nation in its fight for world-wide freedom. I 
do not mean '^college as usual," college as if the coun- 
try were not involved in the greatest conflict of all 
times, but college as the issues and struggles of the 
war have revealed that a college ought to be. I think 
it can be shown that this great war has brought into 
the clear a new ideal and purpose of college training, 
or at least a purpose different from that which many 
of us held formerly. 

The aim of college education as held by those 
undertaking it has been for many years increasingly 
utilitarian. Young men and women have gone to 
college, in order to better their prospects in life, as a 
stepping stone to a profession or a place in business 
in which financial or social rewards would be increased. 



This has held true of students in liberal arts colleges 
as well as those in technical institutions leading direct- 
ly to an occupation. One of the favorite arguments 
for a college course has been a comparison of income 
of college graduates with those of only a high or ele- 
mentary school education, and the argument has been 
used fully as frequently by classical and liberal institu- 
tions as by technical and professional schools. 

The sacrifices of men on the battlefields and of the 
thousands in training for the service condemn this 
attitude. While our brothers are giving their lives in 
the service shall we pursue our selfish advantage here ? 
While they face hardship and death, shall we plan 
and labor to increase the comfort and luxury wherein 
we may spend our hfe ? I trust we are of worthier 
manhood than that. 

Moreover, the war reveals the insufficieney of the 
individualistic attitude. We might fit ourselves for 
high personal rewards and find it impossible to reap 
them because our whole nation is in bondage. We 
are dependent upon our country. Without a nation 
free, strong and wealthy, none of us can be free, 
strong or wealthy. Lowell's great lines, — 

"What were our lives without thee! 
What were all our lives to save thee!" 
were an appeal to patriotism, an apostrophe to the love 
of country; but they are also a statement of cold, sub- 
stantial fact. In these terrible days nations have ene- 
mies which would enslave whole populations, rob 
them of their homes and liveHhood, and ravage and 
burn the very temples in which they worship God. 



What profit a university training, fitting its possessor 
for a lucrative position, to a youth in Belgium today, 
or to an Armenian graduate of an American college in 
Turkey? The question — What were our lives with- 
out our country — is a very practical inquiry as to fact 
and condition. Our lives without our country to de- 
fend and protect us, to make the conditions of our 
living enjoyable and uplifting, to guarantee for us a 
society in which justice, equity and benevolence pre- 
vail were very little worth. 

This war has led us very rapidly in the direction of 
some form of socialism. Individual effort, compet- 
itive strife for the largest possible share of the good 
things of the world, is giving way rapidly to commun- 
ity effort on a large scale and reaching down into the 
intricacies of life in order to protect and conserve the 
common good in which alone the individual may win 
and hold any good for himself. The movement af- 
fects even such personal matters as our daily food. It 
were never more clear that no man liveth to himself 
and no man dieth unto himself. 

The Germans were the first of the great nations to 
learn the lesson and they are today the most highly 
organized and socialized people in the world. In their 
view every member of the empire, from the Kaiser to 
the humblest peasant, lives for the nation alone, and 
the nation has a right to all that he has and is and 
must direct his life to the last detail for the carrying 
out of the national purpose. Each contributing his 
part, whether in the army, the factory, or in the field, 
they are putting forth a united energy that seems 



almost superhuman to make their empire the master 
of the world. The end they seek is power, and pow- 
er in order to wealth, that they may rule by land and 
sea and be the master of the peoples of the earth, with 
none to make them fear. 

Shall we fight them on their own level and try to 
put ourselves in the place they are seeking ? Shall 
we seek to organize ourselves, politically, socially and 
economically, to the end that we may make ourselves 
one of the allied nations dominating the world, ruling it 
by military power, and crushing the liberty and life 
of others on the principle of the survival of the 
strongest .? 

It is the great achievement of President Wilson that 
he has brought into the clear and imbedded in the 
common mind through a phrase that will never be for- 
gotten another and far higher purpose. The demo- 
cracy which he has set in the heart of the world is no 
mere political and governmental method. The Ger- 
man statesmen who interpret it as an attempt at dicta- 
tion as to their form of government miss the real 
meaning of it. We have lived at peace with imperial 
Germany all our lives and were strenuously desirous 
of continuing to do so. Our national spokesman suf- 
fered patiently for years reproach and rebukes without 
number for his insistence on neutrality toward the Im- 
perial German Government. The change from neu- 
trahty to passionate attack, in which Mr. Wilson has 
carried the heart of America whole-souled with him, 
was caused and forced by immoral diplomacy and by 
savagery and inhumanism in the conduct of the war. 



We are fighting for something more than freedom of 
the seas, something other than to checkmate the plan 
of a central European empire ruling the world from 
its Une of fortresses from the North Sea to the Persian 
Gulf. We are fighting for the maintenance in human 
society of customs, laws, and usages which are proper 
to civilized humanity, and we are fighting against the 
attempt to estabHsh the laws of the jungle as recog- 
nized and permanent usages in the relations of men 
and governments with each other. Our enemy is 
baby-murder on the high seas, and the bombardment 
of the cathedral at Rheims, and the rape of Belgian 
women, and the exile and enslavement of civilian 
workmen, and poison gas and defiled wells and the 
unsexing of Servian boys, and the massacre of 750,- 
000 Armenian women and children — the most das- 
tardly and horrible crime ever committed under 
the eye of Almighty God. ' It is these things that 
have overcome all the natural impulses of the 
American people to abstain from war, and reversed 
the deep-imbedded national policy, sanctioned by 
Washington's great name, to hold ourselves aloof 
from European quarrels, and which have brought us 
heart and soul together to win against Germany. It 
is not merely to make the world safe for nations of 
democratic political method; it is to make the world 
safe for the ten commandments and the Golden Rule, 
to put down savagery and clear the way for a human 
society in accordance with principles of justice and 
charity. 

A larger, nobler goal of manhood has dawned upon 



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our horizon. We have been content hitherto to let 
things in general drift, while we made each for our- 
selves the most cheerful and comfortable place we 
could, with as large a share as possible of the good 
things of life, and of course with proper consideration 
for those personal principles and ideals which bring 
one happiness in the long run, as well as a decent re- 
gard for the rights and privileges of our fellowmen. 
Our manners and methods have been for the most 
part tolerable, but our purpose and goal have been 
wrong. Our philosophy has been individualistic, 
whereas in the future it must be social. We have 
based our life on the principle of the struggle for ex- 
istence. Tempered with many amenities from our 
natural humane impulses as well as from the teachings 
of ethics and of religion, we have nevertheless held by 
the principle of the utmost possible for ourselves in 
the competitive struggle of the world as the main- 
spring of our life's endeavor. But the old world of 
competition and war, from which Darwin deduced the 
doctrine of the survival of the strongest, doubtless with 
all truth and accuracy, has become impossible. The 
struggle for existence may have obtained once, and it 
may be all right for tigers still, but as a philosophy of 
the men of the future, it is branded by the light of the 
flaming ruins of Europe as a doctrine of hell. If that 
is human nature, we must change it. If that is the 
world, the real and actual world of today, we must 
build a new world. It does not follow that a biologi- 
cal law which obtained in the era of the saurians must 
hold good when man has come to his dominion. We 

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may have descended from the brutes, but that is no 
reason why we should stay brutish. Man is also a 
creator, and in Galilee two thousand years ago there 
was sketched a model for his work that shall not pass 
from his heart till all things spoken by the prophets 
shall be fulfilled. **And I saw a new heaven, and a 
new earth : for the first heaven and the first earth are 
passed away." 

The problem of youth, therefore, is not. How can I 
train myself for the position of largest personal advan- 
tage in a world of competitive struggle — but rather it 
is. What can I do to make myself a helpful and effi- 
cient worker toward the worthier world we must cre- 
ate? The task is not how to make one's self most suc- 
cessful as a competitor, but how to develop one's 
manhood to the greatest efficiency as a social unit. 

The work of the college, accordingly, is to help 
you grip the problem and work out a solution of your 
own personal relation to the world's freshly discovered 
task. You hear a great deal of the increasingly insist- 
ent call for men and women of scientific training in 
the industries and commerce of the country. The need 
of trained workers in the laboratories and draught- 
ing rooms cannot be supplied. But there is another 
need not less urgent and still more difficult of supply, 
that of men and women of mind and soul to under- 
stand and interpret the new order of things in our 
world. We are come to a new era. We have been 
living under the laws of the jungle, and we must learn 
to live under the laws of God in the great family of 
man. We must work out and make clear a new con- 

12 



stitution for human society on the basis of righteous- 
ness and justice and mercy. We must have a new 
philosophy of hfe, based not upon the struggle for 
existence, but upon the struggle for worthier exist- 
ence. The wages of selfish endeavor for personal ag- 
grandizement, such as we all sought for under the old 
regime, is death : the tightening grip at the throat of 
Germany proves it. From the war, which at first 
seemed to furnish evidence of the bankruptcy of 
Christianity, is coming the revelation that only on the 
basis of Christian truth, Christian morals, and the 
Christian principle of life for the life of others, can a 
stable and decent world be established. 

This conception ought to give life to all our college 
occupation. A new world is in the making. We 
stand before the birth of a grander creation than that of 
the dead and barren stars. A new earth ruled by jus- 
tice and brotherhood is forming in the throes of war 
before our eyes. The sign of the Galilean is in the 
sky for one more victory. All our text books must 
be re-written. The end of many a tendency and 
struggle recorded in history has now come into evi- 
dence, and in the Hght of the issue we must tell the 
whole story anew. The new ideal of humanity will 
affect our view of all ancient and modern literature. 
Political and social science and economics must open 
new chapters, more important than all which have 
gone before. Even the natural and physical sci- 
ences will take on new meaning from the higher 
and nobler purposes to which their laws and 
truths will be devoted. There is no institution 



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which has a more practical and needful function 
just now than the college which is devoted to the 
study of the humanities. In the past our work may 
have seemed at times a bit unreal, and you may have 
thought that we were holding you back from practical 
interests of vital moment. But nothing can be of 
greater moment than the principles and ideals of the 
manhood which henceforth is to be upon the earth. 
To work these out together and to establish in our 
minds the constitution of the world's new day when 
the lust of the conqueror shall no more devastate 
the earth and humanity shall unite its efforts, all for 
the welfare of all, is our college work the coming 
days and years, and may God grant us in the ful- 
fillment of the task a zeal and devotion consonant 
with the nobihty of the ambition. 

Members of the Incoming Class: You begin col- 
lege work at a time when thousands of your brothers 
in our great country are making the utmost sacrifice 
for the flag they love and for the cause of Hberty and 
right. You can justify life in these pleasant halls and 
the privileges of academic fellowship at such a time as 
this only by your best endeavors to make yourselves 
such men and women as will bless and ennoble the 
nation they are defending with their lives. There is 
but one place for every true man and every true 
woman in this day of peril for our country — under 
the colors, either at the front, or with Hke devotion, 
for the country's good, in one of the needful tasks of 
peace. There is no task more needful than the de- 
velopment of manhood of the high ideals and the 



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strength in the execution of them which the new era 
requires. To that task I charge you through all the 
coming four years to consecrate yourselves with a 
devotion worthy of those who represent us where 
deadly danger lies. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 845 689 8 ^ 



MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE BULLETIN 



Published by the College September, October, November, Decem- 
ber, January, April and July. Entered as second-class matter at 
the Post Office, Middlebury, Vermont, under act of Congress of 
July 16, 1894. :: :: :: :: :: 

Vol. XII, September, 1917. Number 1 



